Offer Tracking Settings

TUNE knows that no two offers are alike, and that in many situations, you may want to impose stricter limitations for one offer than for another. Some differences can include:

One offer wants to track user sessions up to 30 days, while another tracks up to 90.

One offer pays partners a flat, one time payout, another will have multiple conversion points where the partner can get a commission.

An advertiser of an offer wants to manually approve each conversion, while another wants to reject any invalid conversions at the end of the billing period.

With the tracking settings available to you in each offer, you can adjust each offer to better adhere to a campaign or advertiser’s requirements. This article describes each offer-level tracking setting.

Offer Conversion Pixel / Postback URL

This is often considered the most important piece of any offer, as it is used to fire any offer conversions when a user has reached the conversion page and the payout is awarded for the partner. Your offer has either an iframe conversion pixel, image conversion pixel, or a server postback URL.

To access the conversion pixel/postback for your offer, go to the offer page, and click Tracking in the Details panel. This takes you to a page where the main offer pixel is located:

With this pixel (or postback if that is set for the offer) you can track conversions for this offer by placing this code on the advertiser’s conversion page.

Offer Goals

If your offer needs to track more than one conversion point in the offer, like a lead-gen form and then the sale of a product, then you can use Offer Goals to set multiple points to track conversions with the same session.

To enable this feature for an offer, go to the Payout panel and click Edit. Then set “Multiple Conversion Goals” to “Enabled”. You can then give the main offer pixel/postback a name, or (if left blank) the pixel appears as “Default” in the list of goals:

Now you can add additional Offer Goals to the offer and set the appropriate payout + revenue for each goal. For more information on this topic, check out our article on offer goals.

Tracking Settings

On the offer’s page, the Tracking panel contains options for a number of tracking-related settings:

This panel hosts the different tracking settings for the offer. Some of these settings are enabled at the network level, and can be enabled or disabled here at the offer level, while others are available on all offers but can also be enabled or disabled. To view all the options, click Edit at the top right of the panel.

Proactive Click Fraud Prevention: When enabled, this setting rejects clicks marked as suspicious by the TUNE fraud database (powered by Fraudlogix). Rejected clicks redirect to a blank page and are not eligible for attribution. Clicks matching known sources of fraud are marked as suspicious even if they are not rejected. The value of this setting is only applied when the Proactive Click Fraud Prevention network-wide tracking setting is “Enabled”.

Non-Unique Click Attribution: When enabled, this setting forwards users from non-unique clicks directly to the Preview URL and attributes conversions only using unique clicks. TUNE determines click uniqueness using a session cookie in the user’s browser. The value of this setting is only applied when the Non-Unique Click Attribution network-wide tracking setting is “Enabled”.

Tracking Domain: This option lets you select what tracking domain you want your partner tracking links and offer pixels/postbacks to use. This is applicable if you have a custom tracking domain or multiple tracking domains set up. By default, the offer will use the default tracking domain, or the go2cloud.org domain for secure conversion pixels if the offer is tracking conversions on a secure page.

Secure Tracking Link: When enabled, this setting defaults tracking links you or your publishers generate to HTTPS. When disabled, tracking links instead default to using HTTP.

Redirect Offer: If this offer hits a conversion/payout/revenue cap, has passed its expiration date, or set to “Paused” status, then you can select another offer to redirect the user to (and register a click for). If no redirect offer is set and the offer is paused, expired, or hits a cap, the user will go to a blank page.

To send them to another offer in your network, select the “Network Offer” option. Then, select the secondary offer from the dropdown menu that appears.

To send them to a specific URL, select the “Offer URL” option. Type or paste the URL into the box that appears. Be aware that if you select this option, no publisher tracking information will be passed to that URL, and no attribution will be credited for the action.

Note: Because this setting relies on the ho_conversions cookie, it only works with pixel-based tracking.

Click Session Lifespan: This setting determines how long a session starting on click can last and still be converted on. You can set the session lifespan to a preset time period (like 1 day or 1 week). TUNE counts each month as 28 days for this setting, which means the lifespan selected may be shorter than expected.

You can also specify a custom lifespan by selecting “Custom” from the dropdown menu and entering your desired session duration in hours (up to 17520). For example, if you want to set the lifespan to 120 days, you would multiply 24 hours in a day x 120 days = 2,880 hours.

Impression Session Lifespan: This setting determines how long a session starting on impression can last and still be converted on. You can set the session lifespan to a preset time period (like 1 day or 1 week). TUNE counts each month as 28 days for this setting, which means the lifespan selected may be shorter than expected.

You can also specify a custom lifespan by selecting “Custom” from the dropdown menu and entering your desired session duration in hours (up to 17520). For example, if you want to set the lifespan to 120 days, you would multiply 24 hours in a day x 120 days = 2,880 hours.

Custom Variables: If you are looking to add custom parameters to your partner tracking links, this setting will let you set up the functionality to do this. Read more about custom variables here.

Direct Links: If you or your advertisers want to have partners promote the landing page URL directly instead of using your own partner tracking links, then the Direct Links tool can help you accomplish this. With this tool, the offer will append the offer & partner IDs to the landing page URL and a piece of Javascript code will start tracking the session and places a cookie in the users browser much like the click redirect does normally.

Deep Links: If this setting is active, partners can direct traffic to a specific page on the advertiser’s site. This is particularly useful for partners working with e-commerce advertisers who want to direct traffic to specific category or product pages. Read our Deep Links article for more information.

Copy Static Parameters to Deep Links: This feature allows you to indicate static parameters in the offer URL. For instance, if your offer URL is:

then enabling this setting adds &source=HasOffers&campaign=12345 to the end of all deep links on this offer. cid={transaction_id} isn’t passed passed into the deep link, as that isn’t a static value.

This feature is helpful if you have parameters that should always be passed to your offer, like Google Analytics parameters. This setting only takes effect if Deep Links above is set to “Active”.

Approve Conversions: This setting lets you set all valid conversions that come from this offer to a “Pending” status in the conversion report. Network admins or advertisers can then manually approve or reject each conversion. This is usually preferred when there is higher payout for each conversion and each conversion is vetted with the advertiser.

Multiple Conversions: If you want to allow more than one conversion from a single session, you can enable this setting. When this setting is enabled, multiple conversions are allowed from the same transaction ID. When disabled, de-duplication rejects conversions fired on the same transaction ID.

Start Session Tracking: By default the session tracking starts at the click when the user is redirected through a partner tracking link. Start Session Tracking also lets you choose to start tracking at the impression instead of the click if you want to place a cookie in the users browser before they click a tracking link. This setting only appears when using a pixel tracking attribution method.

Note: By setting to track on impressions, each impression for this offer will count towards your click count allocation. This means for example if this offer tracks clicks on impression and you have 100,000 impressions for this offer, this will count 100,000 clicks toward the allocated amount your plan comes with. If you plan to run offers with high impression volume, this setting can quickly drive up your click overage costs!

Click Macro: To also track clicks in another tracking system when using TUNE tracking links, you can use this setting. With this setting, you are opting to turn on the global click macro for this offer.

When this setting is enabled, another setting called “Custom Click Macro” will appear below it. In that setting, you can enter the custom click macro URL to send clicks to. To insert the TUNE partner tracking link, you can use one of the {redirect} or {eredirect} macros in the click macro URL (for unencrypted and encrypted URLs, respectively). If “Custom Click Macro” is disabled, then the global click macro set in the network-level tracking settings is used instead.

Encrypted Conversion Tracking: When enabled, this setting encrypts the conversion pixel/postback URL by hashing the offer ID parameter into a shortened URL. Then any incoming conversions from a non-encrypted URL are rejected. This setting cannot be used with global postback URLs, so leave it disabled if you’re using a global postback URL with your offer.

Subscription:Subscriptions let you set up a recurring payout for partners for an offer by just firing the conversion pixel once. If this setting is enabled, you can set the duration of the subscription (1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, or indefinite) and the frequency the payouts take place (daily, weekly, monthly, or annually). A subscription must be tied to an existing Customer List for the recurring payouts to take effect.

Customer List: If you or the advertiser want to capture additional information about the user that converted on an offer, like in the case of building lead generation, a Customer List is the tool you can use. When you add a customer list to this offer by enabling this feature, each attribute from the list will be added as a parameter in the offer pixel/postback, and those values will be stored in the customer list to be exported.

Offer Whitelist: When an offer is set up to track with server postbacks, it is usually best practice to add an Offer Whitelist to an offer so postbacks are only allowed from a specified set of IP addresses. If a postback is fired from outside the list of whitelisted IPs, the conversion is rejected. Keep in mind that pixel-based offers cannot use this feature since each conversion will most likely take place on a different IP.

When you enable this feature, the “Offer Whitelist” panel appears on the offer’s page. There, you can manage the set of IP addresses that the offer postbacks can be fired from.